With the rapidly increasing number of mobile and handheld devices, delivering robust mobile service becomes a necessary capability for TV broadcasting systems, including those complying with the ATSC 3.0 standards for television broadcasting. However providing good mobile service coverage using the existing high-power high-tower (HPHT) single transmitter approach may be challenging. Single frequency networks (SFN) with multiple transmitters can significantly improve the quality of experience (QoE) for mobile users and for users of small-size handheld and portable receivers in challenging environments such as indoor locations. Therefore, deploying lower-power SFN transmitters, possibly in addition to the existing high-power tower, becomes a major trend.
One SFN deployment scenario is to add low-power SFN transmitters (SFN-Tx), also called SFN gapfillers (SFN-GF), to cover holes in a general service area of an existing HPHT transmitter. Another example SFN deployment scenario includes deploying regular SFN transmitters, with the existing HPHT transmitter becoming part of a more uniformly distributed SFN network to cover a larger geographic area.
To implement an SFN, providing backhaul links to each SFN transmitter is needed. Backhaul links are used in wireless communications systems to deliver service data from traffic gateways to radio transmitters. Backhaul links are usually implemented using dedicated wired connections, or wirelessly using dedicated microwave links. However, these solutions can be either unavailable or expensive to install and operate. Lower-cost approaches to providing backhaul to SFN transmitters deployed to broadcast TV and other services in a large area are desirable.